


Recovery

by seasaltedwolverine



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post Infinity War, but i guess that was obvious from the first tag, its named recovery because it was in my back ups that i had to restore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 05:49:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20902652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seasaltedwolverine/pseuds/seasaltedwolverine
Summary: I wrote this before endgame came out and have since decide that endgame isn't cannon any way and I've got some damn opinions about cutting Jane Foster out of the MCU.A quiet storm wraps the night in a soft drizzle, a small comfort extended by the sky. Heavy clouds blanket the town and all it’s sorrows. The low rumble of distant thunder rolls over the hills. Jane remembers a time when every sound from the sky tore at her heart, when thunder hurt. But now, she can only sit quietly and hope that thunder still sounds somewhere.





	Recovery

Jane has a splitting headache. It’s the kind that throbs behind the eyes and brings up serious questions about what an aneurysm feels like.

So, she’s sitting at her kitchen table, waiting for tea to steep in front of her, eyes closed, consciously relaxing every muscle in her head. The small apartment the observatory lets her is quiet but for the pattering of evening rain and if the only things in it were her and her tea and her headache it might even be serene.

But the table is cluttered with the guts of a first aide kit spilled everywhere and piles of paperwork of varying importance and physics detectors and the jagged metal shards of an ancient alien weapon and a small neatly folded brown paper bag full of dust that used to be her friend. The quiet is that of broken things, dejection, of too many tears cried, a sudden realization of instability, of unjust loss. The tea has a shot of whiskey.

It isn’t just her that sits quietly in the wake of impossible tragedy, the entire town, the entire world sits hushed in horror, trying to count what was lost, fearing to realize the scope of the damage. 

She is caught between desperately needing to know what the hell just happened and knowing there is nothing she can do about it.

…..

It had been Darcy who marched the pair of them out the door arms full of equipment and snack food. The sensors had gone ballistic after years of silence, shrieking about a gateway opening on a sidewalk in New York. Once it was clear that no major disaster was imminent Jane had steadfastly ignored the tweets about a pair of Asgardians arguing in front of a demolition project and locks herself into the numbers their arrival generated. 

Her only research opportunities being interstellar annihilation, or a visiting ex was supper shitty especially knowing she could do nothing about either. Pure data will only get her so far sometimes she needs context. A smidge more closure couldn’t hurt either.

But when the sensors showed a gate way opening in Norway just a few hours’ drive from the observatory, Jane had been unable to stop her wayward intern from dragging her out to investigate. Darcy drives and chatters and stuffs her full of road snacks and whines about the speed limit signs being in kilometers and Jane prays in the passenger seat. 

She doesn’t pray much but the man who stole her heart is a god and Darcy’s driving may require divine intervention, so she feels the circumstances might warrant it. She wonders if Heimdall is watching. She wonders who her prayers go to, if anyone’s listening. The gods she knows are very much fallible. 

They haven’t seen a soul in over an hour of driving when the GPS says they’re near the input coordinates. Which is good because they haven’t had much of a road for the last twenty minutes either.

Their journey ends at a windswept sea cliff, beautiful in austerity, all clean lines and open space. The stormy sea salted air smells like lighting and makes a knot in Janes chest. He was here and it’s obvious before she even sees the knotwork burn scar in the grass.

Jane lets her eyes slide closed while she reminds her self that it was her decision and there is no reason her heart should feel the way it does. She takes a breath of sea air and feels the sun on her cheeks and wonders why her life couldn’t be just a smidge simpler.

For the barest second, another world slips into her mind. A world where there are no battles she can’t fight, no quests through the universe she can’t go on. A world where she’s more than a distraction. A world where they could just be, at his home on Asgard or some city on Earth, or even here on some windswept cliff over the ocean. 

She doesn’t allow herself these fantasies often, but just now, with the scent of lighting on the air and years of longing in her heart, she lets herself remember him and what she could have had.

“Jane?” There’s a note in Darcy’s voice she’s only rarely heard. Jane opens her eyes to the bright sun and squints at her intern. 

Darcy isn’t even looking at her. She looks more worried than Jane has ever seen her, including all three times aliens tried to end the world. She’s staring at something on the ground in front of her and Jane really hopes it’s not a body.

It’s worse.

Jagged metal glints from the ground, shattered glyphs inscribed on the flat edges, loose leather wrappings curled around the pieces. She doesn’t understand what it is for several long moments and then all the implications hit her at once.

All the reasons she left come to the fore and her heart feels like its clawing at the cage of her ribs in grief. Time and distance did nothing to cushion this. Did nothing to soften the fear, the loss. 

She sinks to her knees, almost numb. Her hand reaches for the pieces. She only dimly hears Darcy asking if that’s a good idea. 

Her fingers close around the largest shard and tears prick her eyes. It’s no heavier than scrap metal in her hand. There’s no power in these pieces, no lingering hope.

She allows herself three breaths to fall apart. Her throat chokes with unheard sobs and she can feel some tiny bright thing inside her chest crumble. Her eyes spill over and she doesn’t dash at the tears on her cheeks but lets them roll down her face and land on the shattered remains. Then, she gets a bag from the truck and picks up every tiny piece. 

She can’t just leave it here. For SHIELD or whatever shady government organization that replaced them to build another little city around it and then whisk it away to some dark site lab. To sit in the grass on this lonely cliff until time buries it and the world forgets. 

...

They stay out there, camping out of the truck for two days. Darcy came more prepared than Jane knew she could be. The stars wheel overhead and the sea breeze blows. There’s no sign of anything. Then they go home.

To hell with closure. The broken pieces don’t leave her side. She has no idea what to do with them, but she doesn’t let go.

For the first time since Jane’s known her, Darcy doesn’t push it. She barely says anything actually. Neither of them do.

All they know is that something terrible has happened.

And there is nothing they can do.

…

A quiet storm wraps the night in a soft drizzle, a small comfort extended by the sky. Heavy clouds blanket the town and all it’s sorrows. The low rumble of distant thunder rolls over the hills. Jane remembers a time when every sound from the sky tore at her heart, when thunder hurt. But now, she can only sit quietly and hope that thunder still sounds somewhere.

The swelling has gone down where her cheek hit the dash of the car. It’s still going to bruise. Darcy had been driving when she turned to dust. Jane in the passenger seat had just enough time to uselessly gape at her friend before the van went into the ditch. It could have been worse. The van’s gained a new dent in the fender from some one’s mailbox and a new dent the dash from Jane’s face but overall, it’s come out of today better than anyone else.

She’s already called Selvig. His phone rang and rang and eventually went to voicemail. Which could mean nothing. He didn’t have a wonderful grasp of modern communication even before alien technology scrambled his brain. It had taken him 3 weeks to return her last call. But today…

She’s not used to living alone. Part of the reason she always escaped to the roof and the stars was a house full of people. The silence is oppressive in their absence. Her various devices don’t beep at her. No one shuffles in the background. She refuses to let panic even present its self as an idea; wouldn’t do her any good anyway. She is useless, less than useless, less than a pawn on a chessboard. She’s a passive bystander, a face in the crowd, utterly insignificant to whatever machinations of plot erased half the world, and just as insignificant to any future plot that either brings them all back or finishes the job. She had cried, earlier, when the horror was fresh. But there doesn’t seem to be much of a point in bawling herself to exhaustion. So, she’ll just sit here, her own place of quiet in the deafening silence, and ride out the doldrums.

But the thing about quiet is the little sounds you notice. The drip of rain off the roof. The tick of the clock. The sound of footsteps outside on the walk. The creak of the front porch under the weight of a stranger.

Some one’s just outside the door, but they’re hesitating to knock. Jane watches the door pensively, in a neutral kind of resignation', across the apartment, over her tea. She’s got no clue who’s out there. Are they lost? Are they looking for someone? Wandering through the night with only a desperate hope. She only vaguely considers the notion they could be dangerous, crazed with grief with nothing left to lose. She’s numb, detached. Her world is a world where doing dangerous things puts you in danger. Evidently its not this reality, where continued existence is a crapshoot based on a random whim.

She considers calling out. Whoever they’re looking for isn’t here. Maybe it would be kinder. It would be easier for her, she’s seen too many faces of loss today and there’s no comfort she can give. Unless they’re looking for a frazzled grieving astrophysicist they’re going to be disappointed.

But maybe they are. Maybe some truly generous soul, a neighbor, or someone from the observatory, has stumbled out of their own grief to start checking up on everyone else. A roll of thunder echoes across the dark sky and suddenly she knows exactly who stands outside her door, looking for her in the night. 

She's across her small apartment in an instant, her hand on the doorknob when she hesitates. She doesn’t have time to think about all the reasons why when there's a quiet knock. She forgets how to breathe, her neglected heart in her throat.

Then she’s wrenched open the door before she can think about it and it is him and he's standing on her porch and he's back in her life again. It’s him, standing there, dripping rain under her porch light.

Except it's not him. Not really. The Thor she knew, the Thor that left, was a man who knew pain, knew loss and was stronger for it. 

The man who stands at on the threshold has been broken and put back together again by chance and circumstance. His hair is gone, cropped close to his skull, none too gently from the looks of the ragged edges. The color’s gone out of him, his armor stained and shaded nearly black. There’s a massive battle axe in his fist, a fearsome thing, made for war and nothing else. His eyes don’t match. It seems one was clawed out of his skull, then replaced. The scars crossing his face set him off balance. The shorn hair, the missing eye, the shattered hammer, seem like superficial clues to the tragedy in the set of his shoulders. He may not be dead, but there are worse things and it looks like he found them. 

He lets her judge him, see for her self the changes time has wrought. 

He's numb in relief, like he was so prepared to see her as a pile of dust that he doesn’t know what to do with her alive. 

His good blue eye roves her face, lingering on the swelling bruise on her cheekbone. He reaches for her like she's the last life line he's got, like he's not sure she's real. But he stops his hand, he's not sure he has the right to touch her anymore. 

Jane is the one to close the space between them. Her hand finds his cheek and he's warm and alive and real beneath her fingers. Her thumb brushes rain drops that should be tears off the ridge of scar tissue across his cheek and mismatched eye. He looks like he would collapse into her, but he won't allow himself the luxury. 

She lets herself be selfish and makes the decision for both of them. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and pulls him to her, burying her face in the battle stained armor on his chest. It’s been an unbelievably shitty day and, from the looks of it, worse for him. She needs something, anything, to cling to and if it’s to be this broken-down shell of a god she loved then so be it. He needs a hug too. He moves slowly, so slowly, like he’s afraid he’ll break something as he moves to hold her. She can feel the rain dripping out of his hair to run down her back when he lets his head fall to her shoulder. There’s a kind of desperation in his hands, just a step short of tremble. They stand there tangled for a long time, clutching each other more fiercely than perhaps strictly necessary. 

She can feel the rumble of words in his chest.

“I’m sorry, I am sorry, I’m so sorry.” An endless litany of apology she’s not sure is meant for her. She might be the only one left to hear it. 

She needs to get him inside, and warm, and dry, and cared for, because she can’t do much but she’ll be damned if she won’t do all that she can. She invites him inside and then doesn’t give him a choice, pulling out of his arms to take his hand. He might have the mildest of protests but allows himself to be lead in to her home and deposited at the cluttered kitchen table.

There’s still hot water in the kettle and Jane’s mother raised a polite host. Its rote memory that gets the mug out of the cabinet and the tea bag and water into said mug. The whiskey is out on the counter, so she adds a splash. Then another. She gives up and takes both the mug and the bottle to the table.

He’s staring at the shards of Mjolnir..

“Didn’t feel right to leave her there” Jane says. She puts the mug in front of him and settles into her own chair. She doesn’t say anything else.

He's noticed the bruise on her cheek but doesn't ask.

She can see the ashen dust beneath his fingernails but doesn't ask.

He knows she deserves explanations and probably apologies, but he has no idea where to start. He doesn’t want to explain it, he doesn’t want to relive it. He’s good at telling stories, but this isn’t a story he’s ready to tell.

He wasn’t terribly concerned with surviving this latest battle. Winning yes but continuing on alone isn’t something he’s sure he can do

He tries. He tries to tell her. But so much is his fault. His failings. His family is dead, his home destroyed, half the universe erased by some fool he was not enough to stop. 

He doesn’t start at the beginning. He’s not sure where that is. She already knows about the nightmares. She knows it’s a part of why he left. The coming of the end of days, death and destruction played over and over in his head on some deadly refrain. He tells her about his search for the skull/crown of Sutur. Coming back to an Asgard that most definitely was not in his fathers’ image. Loki, the little shit, alive and well, having dispensed with his homicidal tendencies and returning to more obnoxious shenanigans. His father, old and lonely on that seaside cliff. Hela, mad and violent and not wrong, not a liar. Stakar, loud and filthy and tacky and rife with unexpected allies. Banner and his unexpected development with the Hulk. The jaded hard drinking Valkyrie with her millennia of bitter rage. 

He tells her of the razing of Asgard, the fall of an empire. 

He tells her of his informal coronation as King of the refugees. 

He tells her of the attack.

He’s quiet.

He starts again. He tells her that Thanos the mad titian has won, that he has achieved his goal of wiping out half the universe and that is why the people around her have turned to dust. He tells her that he had collected the infinity stones. The Eather and the reality stone it contained was not safe in the hiding place the Asgardians had found for it. That obnoxious wizard had not managed to keep a hold of the time stone. A planet had been razed to ashes for the power stone. The Vison died as Thanos ripped the mind stone from his head. He had found the soul stone lost to myth and legend. The space stone… the tesseract…

He tells her about the dust, the look on Rogers face as his blood brother fell apart before him. The tortured relief of the scarlet witch, the panic of those left behind. Friends and allies he hadn’t the time to meet, all gone for some twisted sense of balance. An entire universe left grieving, half an infinite number.

He’s quiet again. Because the story is over now. There is no bittersweet victory, no redemption, no place for vengeance. It’s just the end.

**Author's Note:**

> what i want to be doing is writing but my brain refuses to do the thing so im posting old shit that i find floating around in the recesses of my computer


End file.
